


you've helped me find my way (through the wild and wonders)

by TheJGatsby



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Force Bond, Post-TLJ, background finnrose - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 09:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13097523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: The Force Bond doesn't go away, after Crait."I don’t understand why you refused me. You don’t have to be lonely anymore, Rey, you know you don’t, you know I want you with me, so why?”“Because you haven’t changed,” she says. “Because you’re still ruled by fear, and hate, and anger, and I can’t- I can’t.”“If I change?” he asks, breathless, eyes wide. “Then will you come to me?”





	you've helped me find my way (through the wild and wonders)

**Author's Note:**

> I started this as soon as I left the theater GOD that was a good movie.  
> Title from Build Me Up from Bones by Sarah Jarosz, which is a song i would recommend, like, thematically. (Secondary/alternate titles included the lines "I need to show you how/I can love you better than before")  
> Chinese translation [here](http://cherishfan0320.lofter.com/post/1df5d8eb_1205a709) courtesy of [Cherish_R](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherish_R) / 感谢[Cherish_R](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherish_R),中文翻译请看[这里](http://cherishfan0320.lofter.com/post/1df5d8eb_1205a709)

The first time Rey sees him after Crait, the bond opening up and conjuring him abruptly before her, neither of them speak. Tension thrums between them, the Force that links them and the overwhelming twist of emotions she still hasn’t quite sorted through. She bares her teeth, but he disappears before she can tell him to leave.  
  
The second time, she screams at him, furious and wild, like a wounded animal, throwing everything she can get her hands on. She doesn’t know if it’ll hit him, doesn’t really understand what is and isn’t corporeal in these little meetings, but he flinches nonetheless, and then he’s gone.  
  
He appears, again and again, and she hates him, and she hates herself for the way she hesitates, every time, before she strikes out, sends him off. But every time, she sees his eyes, and they’re the _same_ , the same as they were on the island, the same eyes that looked at her and _saw_ her, saw her like no one ever had, saw past everything, saw past Rey-from-nowhere, made her feel greater than herself. And for that moment, she’s back there, and she remembers him reaching out and banishing the aching loneliness, the reminder of that mirror expanse, just herself and herself and herself, on and on forever, alone into eternity. He felt real, then, more real than anything ever had, and she wanted to throw herself into his arms and let that realness surround her, overwhelm her, wash away the great empty expanses of desert that still lived in her.  
  
But she remembers, also, him stepping towards the empty throne, him reaching out to take another killer’s place, and the freefall of disappointment as she realized he hadn’t changed, not really. So she lashes out and makes him leave her, before she can do anything foolish like ask him _why_.  
  
Then, weeks after Crait, she hesitates, and he says her name, and she wants to hate the way it sounds in his mouth, soft and beseeching. “Please,” he says, like he did in the throne room, among all that fire and wreckage, and she wonders how she could ever have seen him belonging anywhere else than at the center of destruction. “Please, just talk to me.”  
  
She curls her hand around a hydrospanner, ready to hurl it at him, but instead she just holds it tight in a white-knuckled fist and asks him, “What is there to say? I tried, Kylo Ren.” He flinches at that name, and she thinks, _good_. “I believed in you. Even Luke had given you up for lost, and I _believed_ you could still- and you _betrayed_ me!”  
  
“How?” he asks, face clouding over with frustration. “How did I betray you? I saved you, I fought at your side, I offered you the _galaxy_! You’re the one who turned on me, you’re the one who broke the damn lightsaber and left me there. I did nothing to you. I would have given you everything, Rey. I still would, if-”  
  
“If what? If I abandon the Resistance? If I let you kill all my friends? Fat chance.” She draws her arm back and throws the hydrospanner at him, but before it makes contact, he’s gone.

\--

The First Order is in disarray, in the wake of Snoke’s death. Intelligence carries reports of conflict in the upper ranks, officers jockeying for power, groups splintering off to fight each other. They’re weakened, but not as much as the Resistance, not enough. Months after Crait, the Resistance receives news of a tenuous peace amongst the ranks, a council brought together to lead in the absence of a central figurehead, and they know it’s the end of their reprieve.  
  
They’ve managed to regroup, somewhat, in the interim, gather allies, bolster their ranks, but it’s not enough, and they’re like frightened animals more than any fighting force, scurrying from hiding place to hiding place, licking their wounds, and everyone is tense and anxious and restless with it, but there’s not much they can do that they’re not already doing, especially the dozen or so of them who survived Crait, the last of the original Resistance.  
  
Rey likes Rose- she’s sweet, and fiery, and brave, and Finn looks at her with stars in his eyes, and Rey expects almost to feel jealous, but finds she doesn’t. Finn is her friend, and he’s dear to her, and maybe if the world were a different place, she would want him like that, but all she is is happy for them. Poe flirts with her, and she laughs at him and turns him down, and he shrugs and says it was worth a shot, pulls her into a hug, and then they settle into a friendship based mainly on being the two wildest pilots in the Resistance.  
  
(The matter of who’s better has yet to be settled, and probably never will, but the competition keeps them both on the edge of their game, and Leia only ever rolls her eyes and tells them to be careful.)  
  
Rey can barely face Leia, most days. She is a woman made stronger by her losses, and Rey wants to ask her how, learn that secret, but the shame of _I tried to bring your son back and failed_ sits heavy in her chest and keeps her from doing anything but ducking her head and saying “yes, General” when she’s given orders and avoiding her the rest of the time.  
  
Rey knows that Leia has given him up for lost as well, just as Luke did, just as Rey would like to, but every time she closes her eyes she sees the same future she saw when they touched, and she doesn’t believe that it came and went in the ruins of that throne room, doesn’t believe that they’ve even reached it yet. She wants to write him off and throw him away and let him be a lesson, but no matter how hard she tries, she can’t.  
  
Before, she believed he would turn, knew it in her heart. Now, she’s not nearly so certain, but she wants it so much more.

\--

Rey wakes in the middle of the night, eyes flying open, to see him above her, sitting on her bed looking down at her, and he’s _sad_ , sad and confused, and she doesn’t move as he reaches out and touches her face. He strokes a thumb across her cheekbone and she leans into it, pressing into the palm of his hand.  
  
“I don’t understand,” he says, soft. “I don’t understand you. You’re still so lonely-”  
  
“I’m not,” she argues. “I have friends.”  
  
“You know you can’t lie to me, not like this. You were dreaming of your family, I could feel your pain all the way across the galaxy. It’s heartbreaking, Rey.” He runs his fingers into her hair, as if to emphasize his point, gentle and intimate, the bond between them alive at the touch, and she grits her teeth against her reaction, closing her eyes and fighting back emotion. She knows what he’s not saying- she loves her friends, they’re dear and close to her, closer than anyone she ever had, but it’s nothing like him, nothing like this. “You’re so lonely,” he says, “and it’s worse than ever, because you know what it’s like not to be, because we stood side-by-side, and you can’t forget that, and I can’t forget that, and I don’t understand why you refused me.” His other hand comes up to cup her face, and he presses his forehead against hers. “We could have kept this,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to be lonely anymore, Rey, you know you don’t, you know I want you with me, so why?”  
  
There are times, like now, wrapped in the sense of compassion and kinship that accompanies their bond on good days, feeling concern and empathy rolling off him in waves, that she asks herself the same question. She felt strong, in that throne room, stood taller than she ever had with him at her back. She remembers talking to him on the island, telling him about the cave and the mirror and the darkness, the warmth and comfort of that conversation a product of more than just the fire.  
  
But those are just moments, and she can’t just ignore everything that happened between those memories, everything else he did, everything he continues to do.  
  
“Because you haven’t changed,” she says, her voice cracking on the last word, a tear slipping down her cheek. “Because you’re still ruled by fear, and hate, and anger, and I can’t- I can’t.”  
  
“If I change?” he asks, breathless, eyes wide. “Then will you come to me?”  
  
She stares at him, and his thumb swipes over her cheekbone, but the tear stays, because after all he’s not really here, is he?  
  
“Please go,” she says. “I can’t. I can’t.”  
  
He disappears, but the memory of his hands lingers on long after, and she doesn’t sleep.

\--

The fight is hard, and Rey is tired. The bigger the Resistance grows, the more complex it becomes, the more she and her friends are scattered. Finn is a hero, a symbol, and where he goes, morale follows, so he goes a lot of places. Poe sits at Leia’s right hand, glued to her side on the rare occasion he’s not leading daredevil missions, turning the First Order inside out with his seat-of-the-pants battle genius. She can feel them slipping away from her, and takes comfort in the fact that she and Rose, at least, tend to stay central.  
  
Rose sits with her and braids her hair and tells her stories of her sister, Paige, and their family, and Rey likes her enormously and envies her immensely. Things are hard, for all of them, but Rose grieves a family that loved her, and when she talks about them, she glows with the fondness of happy memories. Rey listens and smiles and basks in the thrill of belonging that comes every time Rose treats her like a sister, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling on the outside when Finn comes home and they still haven’t figured out how to be three people instead of Rey tagging along awkwardly with the two of them and their bright, new, giddy sort of love, so she excuses herself and makes time for each of them apart but rarely together.  
  
At night, she still has nightmares of being left behind, and the place in her where hope and faith had lived is a raw, ragged hole, agony around the edges where it was torn away. She’s closed that door on her past, accepted the truth, but that doesn’t stop her from hating them with everything she has, some nights, hating them for stranding her, for leaving her in limbo, for building the prison she locked herself in for so long. She wonders what her life would have been like if she’d left before, if she’d accepted they were never coming back for her, if she’d let herself move on, and she can’t imagine it. It hurts with the same sense of loss as her old when-my-family-comes-back fantasies, dashed hopes and impossible futures, so she stops trying to picture it after a while.  
  
Rey knows her friends care, and they do their best to show it, make her feel it, but as much as they’re all hers, they’re not hers alone, they belong to each other, too, to the Resistance, to their own families, here or gone, and there’s a small, awful, selfish part of her that wants something that’s _hers_ , nobody else’s, wants to be the center of someone’s world the way hers centered for so long on the people who left her.  
  
That’s the part of her that stops sending Kylo Ren away every time he comes to her, that lets him stay, because he keeps coming back to her, because he chose her over his master, because the bond between them is theirs alone.  
  
It’s another part of her that tells him, every time, that she’ll never join him, that she’ll never choose him, that he had his chance and wasted it, that she’s not going to reach out again, not ever.

\--

“I loved my father,” he says to her, one night, close to dawn. She couldn’t sleep, and she supposes he couldn’t either, or it’s daytime wherever he is, but she’s sitting on the edge of a wide field, waiting for the sun to rise.  
  
“I loved my father,” he says, “and I killed him. Is that what you want to hear? I loved my father, he was a good man, he didn’t always know what to say or how to deal with me or with the Force or any of that, but he loved me, and he wanted me to be happy, and he taught me how to fly, and I killed him. He loved me and I killed him for it.”  
  
“I know,” she says, and stares out at the horizon. The gray light of dawn is starting to creep over the broad expanse of grasses, and she spares a thought to how lovely it is.  
  
“That’s all?” he asks.  
  
“Unless you have something more to say, yes.”  
  
He doesn’t, and they sit in silence, watching the sun come up.

\--

Rey finds a little girl rummaging through the aftermath of a battle, one day, looking for scavenge, so she gives her the food she has in her pack, and watches the girl take it with wide eyes and hold it close to her chest like she’d die before letting anyone take it from her, and Rey sees herself, so she bites the inside of her cheek and turns away and waits until she’s alone in her bunk that night to break down, sobbing.  
  
She doesn’t know he’s there until she feels his arms around her, the same ghostly not-quite-touch she’s grown used to, and she turns into Ben’s body and cries so hard she can barely breathe.  
  
“It’s not fair,” she chokes out, strained and short, still almost hysterical. “They just- left. They left me.”  
  
“I know,” he says, softly, and she feels the press of half-corporeal lips in her hair. “I know, sweetheart, I’m sorry. You deserve better.”  
  
Rey presses herself closer, wishes he were here. He wants her, she knows. He seeks her out. He begged her to join him, and right now she wishes she’d said yes, wishes she had something more than whatever half-solid image of him the Force conjures up for her. She wishes she weren’t alone.  
  
“You’re not alone,” he says, and she doesn’t know whether she said it aloud or if he just knew what she needed to hear. “You’re not alone anymore, and you never will be again. I’m here,” he says.  
  
“But you’re _not_.”

\--

It stays with her, that moment of comfort, the solace of his arms, so the next time he comes to her, in broad daylight, as she wanders through the forest, she looks right at him, and thanks him.  
  
He looks stunned for a moment, and then the tips of his ears turn red and he mumbles some platitude that she doesn’t quite catch, and his awkwardness is inexplicably charming. She smiles at him, and his blush deepens, and it feels light, and uncomplicated, for just a moment, and she wraps her hands around that feeling and presses it into her heart like a flower between books.

\--

“I don’t know how to change,” he tells her, on another dark, quiet night. She’s sleeping on the ground, this time, out under the stars, and he’s lying next to her, their faces just breaths apart. “I can’t keep living like this, every choice I make is wrong, but I don’t know how to change.”  
  
Rey bites her lip, thinks hard about it. She doesn’t know where to start- he’s a mess, and she’s not that much better, but she thinks about the way it felt to admit that her family was never coming back, the weight that dropped from her even as it hurt, and she thinks that she owes him something, for that, and for holding her while she cried, and for fighting with her, and she realizes as she’s tallying up this ledger that it’s not a zero-sum game, that he’s reaching out to her, this time, asking her for help, and the part of her that still believes in him, despite everything, wants to give it to him.  
  
“You’re running,” she says. “You’re always trying to get away from something, you can’t… you’re aimless. All you want is to get away, but where do you want to go?”  
  
“That depends, where are you?” he asks, a slight quirk of his lips, and she fights her own smile.  
  
“That would be telling.”  
  
“You’re going to make me earn it, aren’t you?” He’s not talking about her location anymore, and neither is she.  
  
“Nothing worth having ever came easy.”  
  
He sighs. “All right.” She expects that to be the end of it, but instead he reaches for her hand and kisses it, and she thinks every time he touches her through the Force she gets more aware of how far he is. “Here’s where I want to go,” he tells her, lips moving against her knuckles, gaze fixed firmly on hers. “How do I get there?”  
  
She stares at him for a moment, heart skipping a beat, feeling a blush rise in her cheeks at the intensity of his eyes, and she finds herself wondering, unbidden, if his lips are as soft as they feel on the rough, scarred skin of her hand. She pulls back from him, abruptly, and rolls over, turning away and hiding her face as she goes so bright red it’s a wonder she doesn’t glow in the dark.

\--

Things change, after that. She still refuses to go to him, but she stops telling him to leave when he comes to her. They talk. It’s easy- they can’t quite read each other’s minds, but they’re very aware of each other, very open. His face is closed-off, his expressions tightly controlled and subtle, but she comes to learn him, the quiet play of emotions on his dramatic features.  
  
He has a particular expression, when he’s teasing her or trying not to laugh at something she’s said, the corners of his lips playing up into a smile even as his mouth tightens to suppress it. She likes that one, and she tries to coax it out of him as much as possible, and that’s how things start to become easy between them, how the beginnings of a normal friendship start to grow up underneath the intensity of their connection.

\--

Rey gets shot down, the S-foil of her fighter reduced to a smoking stump, and barely manages to make an emergency landing without reducing her ship to a fireball. The world goes black as soon as she hits the ground, a jarring impact that rattles all of her bones, and when she opens her eyes next, it’s to the sterile, blinding white of the medbay, and she grimaces.  
  
Rose arrives a few minutes later, as the med-droid is removing the last of her connections to the bacta suit, and waits until Rey is dressed to pull her into a hug.  
  
“We were all so worried,” she says, going on her toes to tuck her chin over Rey’s shoulder. “Finn and Poe are both deployed right now but they made me promise to comm them as soon as there was news.”  
  
Rey swallows the lump in her throat, touched by their concern, and pulls back to smile at her friend. “Well let’s go call, we don’t want to disappoint them.”  
  
Rose hardly leaves her side that day, filling her in on what she missed, and they get started on outfitting a new fighter for her, considering Rey’s wasn’t in shape to be anything more than scrap when they pulled her out of it.  
  
“Poe’s going to say this makes him a better pilot than you,” Rose warns, passing a part up to Rey in the cockpit, and Rey remembers abruptly that Rose had lost her sister in battle, and she’s sticking close like this because it was nearly Rey who died this time, and Rey can’t put words to it but that understanding fills her with a warm rush of fondness and a slight ache for the grief Rose is still, quietly, suffering.  
  
“He can say that,” Rey replies cheerfully, “but that won’t make it true.”  
  
That night, she waits until the base is quiet, then sneaks out, into the jungle that surrounds them on this planet, and she reaches out in the Force, seeking him out for the first time.  
  
“Did you miss me?” she asks, and his eyes are wide when he turns, then he’s rushing forward, his hands on her face, on her shoulders, skimming over her arms as if checking that she’s all there, all in one piece.  
  
“You’re alive,” he says, choked with relief, and she catches his hands in hers.  
  
“I’m fine,” she says, smiling at him. “Not even sore.”  
  
“I thought- I couldn’t find you,” he says, and he looks frightened, and smaller than he is, so she squeezes his hands in a gesture of comfort. “I killed the one who shot you down.”  
  
Rey snorts. “You killed your own soldier? Whose side are you on?”  
  
He frowns at her, baffled. “Yours,” he says, as if it’s obvious, as if it’s the only answer.  
  
All her affection evaporates suddenly and she scowls at him and steps back, letting go of his hands. He reaches out after her for the barest second, then draws his fists tight against his sides. “Is that why you’re still working with the people I’m fighting a war against?” she snaps.  
  
He has the grace to look shamed, at least, and then she shuts off the bond and leaves him.

\--

The First Order ferrets them out at their base, and the Resistance scrambles. Rey lands on a sparsely-populated outer rim planet, just on the edge of Huttspace, and sits on her fighter staring out at wide expanses of empty, rocky earth, shot through here and there with slate-gray trees that seem like they’ve been dead for years. It looks like someplace that could have been green, once, before something awful happened.  
  
“Kill the past,” she says, calling Ben to her, and he frowns. “Destroy the old. End the Jedi, end the Sith, the Resistance, end it and destroy it and wipe it all away.”  
  
“What are you getting at?” he asks.  
  
Rey shrugs. “You can’t build on ruins. Scorched earth won’t grow anything new.” She leans her head on his shoulder.  
  
“I don’t understand.”  
  
“You have to accept the past to move on from it. Running from it, fighting it, razing it to the ground, that won’t let you move on. You’re still just living in it, same as I was living in my past for years on Jakku. You made me accept it for what it was, let go of it, and now I can grow. I’m not waiting anymore, but you… you’re still suffering, you talk about killing the past but you’re obsessed with Vader’s legacy, you’re leading the remnants of a dead Empire. Isn’t it time to build something new?”  
  
“Yet you have the sacred Jedi texts still.”  
  
“There’s a difference between living in the past and learning from it.”  
  
He hums and leans his head on hers. “What does accepting the past look like?”  
  
“It’s your life. You tell me.”  
  
They sit in silence, and the wind makes a weak attempt at stirring the desolate landscape. “Will you listen?” he asks, after a long pause. “If I wanted to tell you, would you want to listen?”  
  
“I would,” she says, and means it. “I want to know. I want to understand you.”  
  
“So you can turn me?” he asks, wry.  
  
“No,” she says, and he lifts his head to look at her. “If you turn it’ll be because you want to. I’m not… I can’t do anything about that. It has to be your choice.”  
  
“And if I never do?” he asks. “You’ve already sworn never to come to me.”  
  
“Then we’ll meet like this forever,” she says, with a contrived ease that she hopes doesn’t sound as false as it feels. “This is what we’ll have.”  
  
He presses his face into her hair, and she feels more than hears him whisper, _I want more than this_.

\--

She doesn’t see him for a long time, after that. Ben doesn’t visit her, and when she tries to visit him, he sends her away, and she resents the reversal. So she waits until he’s sleeping, and she kneels on the edge of his bed, and opens her mouth to speak, but his eyes snap open, and when he sees her over him they go wild and terrified, and his saber is in his hand and slashing through her before she can move, and she’s thrust back into her body with a visceral, uncomfortable sensation of something burning through her. When she rolls up her shirt, touches her skin, there’s nothing there, but she can’t forget the feeling.  
  
Half an hour later, he appears suddenly, standing in front of her, looking haggard, eyes red-rimmed, hands shaking, and he falls heavily to his knees.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he starts. “I didn’t mean to- I would never, you know I don’t want to hurt you, Rey, I’m so-”  
  
“No,” she says, sitting up on the edge of her own bed and reaching out to hold his face in her hands. “No, I’m sorry, I frightened you, I should have thought- it reminded you of Luke, didn’t it?”  
  
“Yes,” he says, small and rough with shame and self-loathing, and she runs her fingers through his hair. His eyes fall closed and he drops his head into her lap, his hands gripping tightly at her calves.  
  
“It’s all right,” she murmurs, stroking his hair while he breathes, raggedly, and she’s not sure if he’s crying or just trying desperately not to. “You didn’t hurt me, I know you wouldn’t hurt me. You’re all right.”  
  
They sit like that for a long time, Rey curled over Ben protectively, soothing him, until he speaks. “I can’t sleep sometimes,” he says, rough. “I don’t even want to close my eyes, I’m so afraid that when I wake up it’ll happen again, but I won’t be fast enough to stop it.”  
  
Rey presses her nose into his hair. She doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” she ventures, and he huffs out a short laugh, pressing his face closer into her leg.  
  
“You didn’t mean to,” he tells her, and it’s not what she meant but she’s glad he doesn’t resent her, regardless. “You wouldn’t. You’re too good.”

\--

Finn and Rose are in love, and Rey is happy for them, she really is, she always has been, but lately there’s been something else, too, something sharp and bitter and almost like jealousy. But she knows she doesn’t have feelings for either of them, so it can’t be that, and she goes to Poe for advice, because he’s the oldest of them all, he knows these things.  
  
“You’re jealous of their relationship,” he explains to her, and it’s obvious. “You want a sweetheart.” He’s smiling at her, teasing, but it just reminds her of Ben calling her ‘sweetheart’ the night she cried about her parents, and it all comes together for her in upsetting clarity. “Is there a crush you’re not telling us about, sunshine?”  
  
She furrows her brow at Poe- handsome Poe, charming Poe, brave and charismatic and funny, everything Rey’s learned the people in holodramas want in a boyfriend, and she thinks maybe she’s wrong, maybe she just wants the intimacy her friends have and doesn’t much care who it comes from, so she leans forward and kisses Poe on the mouth.  
  
It’s brief and unexciting and awkward, and he pushes her back gently by the shoulders. “Nice try,” he says, still teasing, but kind. “But I know it’s not me.”  
  
So does Rey, but, well, it was worth a shot.

\--

“Can you speak to my mother?” Ben asks her, one day, apropos of nothing, appearing next to her where she sits propped against her x-wing, playing with scraps and wires.  
  
“Is that wise?” she asks, one brow quirked. “Being the middleman of a conversation between the leader of the First Order and the general of the Resistance?”  
  
He rolls his eyes. “First off, I can’t see anything but you. I wouldn’t be able to get any intelligence you don’t share with me. And I don’t… I’m not the leader of anything.”  
  
Rey frowns. “But you wanted to be supreme leader, that’s why you killed Snoke.”  
  
“I killed Snoke because he was a bastard and he’d hurt you and he wanted one or both of us to die. Being the Supreme Leader was a fringe benefit, and it… wasn’t for me. I’m not suited to that much power.” He ducks his head to hide a smile. “I prefer books to battles, if I’m being honest.”  
  
Rey grins. “So you’re telling me if I had a library to lure you away, the war would be over?”  
  
Ben looks at her, eyes sparking with something she can’t put a name to. “Believe me, sweetheart, you don’t need a library to tempt me.”  
  
Rey feels the blush come over her and she looks away, getting to her feet. “I can- your mother is on the base. If you want to speak to her.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says, standing as well. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”  
  
“It’s fine.” She flashes him a smile and she knows it’s too weak to be convincing. “Do you want to speak to Leia or no?”  
  
He pauses, searching her face for something, and then says, “I do.”  
  
They’re lucky, and Leia is alone when they find her in one of the war rooms. Rey knocks gently on the doorframe, and Leia looks up at her, surprised.  
  
“Um, may I speak to you for a moment, General?” Rey asks, nervous. Leia smiles softly at her, and Rey can never escape the awareness that this woman is a living legend, and she has no idea how she’s going to react to what Rey has to say.  
  
“Of course,” Leia says, magnanimous, and Rey steps into the room, standing on the opposite side of the table from Leia.  
  
“I, um. Your son wants to speak with you,” she says, because she doesn’t know how else to start this conversation. Leia furrows her brow and opens her mouth to ask, but Rey plows on. “He’s, well, he’s not here, but the Force-”  
  
Leia’s eyes go wide. “He’s not-?”  
  
It takes Rey a moment to realize that she thinks Ben is a ghost. “No! No, he’s alive, we just, we’re connected through the Force, Ben and I, we can… talk to each other.”  
  
Leia’s face shutters. “Don’t you mean Kylo Ren?” she asks.  
  
Rey clenches her jaw, and her eyes go steely for a moment. “No,” she says, hard in his defense, because she’s not in the business of giving up. “I mean Ben.”  
  
He stares at her quizzically. “What did she say?”  
  
“She called you Kylo Ren.”  
  
He grimaces. “I deserve that.”  
  
“Probably,” she says. _But I don’t like it._  
  
“Are you talking to him?” Leia asks, looking between Rey and the space where Kylo is standing, which would be empty, to her. “I can feel… something, I don’t know what, but it’s strong, and it’s… strange, and it reminds me of him.”  
  
“He’s right there,” Rey says, gesturing. “He can’t see or hear anything but me, though, so don’t worry, there’s no risk to Resistance intelligence.”  
  
“Of course not,” says Leia, smiling. “I trust you’re smarter than that, Rey.”  
  
Rey ducks her head, feeling a rush of warmth at the compliment. “Thank you.”  
  
“What does he want?” Leia asks, and Rey repeats the question to Ben. He frowns thoughtfully for a moment, and then starts speaking.  
  
“He says he’s sorry he can’t tell you this himself, face-to-face,” Rey tells Leia, “but he thinks it’s less important that it gets said the perfect way than that it gets said at all. He says he’s sorry, first of all, for everything. For all the wrong choices he made. He’s sorry for what he did to Han- sorry, he insists that I- Ben, please, we all know what you mean, please don’t make me say it.”  
  
He grimaces. “She needs to know that I’m acknowledging my mistakes directly, I can’t keep talking around killing my father.”  
  
“Well, I prefer to talk around it.”  
  
“Please, Rey?”  
  
She looks back to Leia. “He insists that I say he’s sorry for killing his father, in those words, because he doesn’t want to talk around it.”  
  
Leia smiles, a slight, watery thing. “That’s not like him,” she says. “He always loved talking around things- he would’ve made a lovely politician if we hadn’t sent him to Luke.”  
  
Rey thinks about that for a moment, Ben stately and composed and dignified like his mother, none of the raw wildness of him, and she likes the idea well enough, but prefers the him she has. “Well,” she says to Leia, “it might not be like him, but I think he’s trying to change.”  
  
“I am,” Ben insists, earnest. “Don’t tell her that, I’m telling you- I am, Rey, I’m trying.”  
  
“I know,” she tells him, soft. “We can talk about it later. What else do you want to tell your mother?”  
  
He bites his lip. “That I love her,” he says. “And I’m grateful, and I know she did what she thought was best, even though it was sometimes wrong.”  
  
Leia rolls her eyes when Rey repeats that last part. “You tell him he’s the last person who should be judging my decisions,” she says, but she sounds more fond than angry.  
  
“She says you have no right to judge her decisions,” Rey tells him, and pauses for effect. “I agree.”  
  
Ben snorts. “Fine, that’s fair. One last thing,” he says. “Tell her I’m done fighting.”  
  
Rey’s heart stops. “What do you mean?”  
  
He meets her eyes, unwavering. “I mean I’m walking away. I’m not going to fight her- or you- anymore. It’s over.”

\--

Leia stops her on her way out of a briefing, a few days later. “Thank you,” she says, holding Rey by the shoulder with her hand that isn’t resting on her cane. “Thank you for having enough faith to bring him back.”  
  
“I didn’t,” Rey says. “He chose that on his own, I had nothing to do with it.” She can’t help the note of pride in her voice, though, and Leia smiles.  
  
“I think you had more to do with it than you know, Rey.” She squeezes Rey’s shoulder, and Rey turns to leave. “You care for him,” Leia says, stopping her in her tracks.  
  
Rey stares at the ground for a long moment. “I do,” she says, at last.  
  
“Good,” Leia says, and turns away.

\--

Weeks pass with nothing from Ben, and Rey starts to worry. She wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, covered in a cold sweat, and knows something is deeply wrong. When she finds Ben, he looks panicked, his face bleeding, his chest heaving, and the fear in the air is so palpable she doesn’t even need the Force to sense it.  
  
“Ben, what’s going on? Why are you bleeding?”  
  
His head whips around to her, and her shuffles closer. “They found out I killed Snoke,” he murmurs, thin with terror. “They’re after me.”  
  
“Tell me where you are, I’ll come help you.” He smiles at her, and she just glares. “I’m not joking, Ben, tell me where you are!”  
  
“I can’t let you do that,” he says, still soft, as if he’s afraid of being overheard.  
  
“Yes you can,” she insists. “Let me help you.”  
  
“You swore you would never come to me.”  
  
“Well I take it back!” she snaps. “Tell me where you are, you bastard.”  
  
“I can’t put you in danger.”  
  
“Bullshit!” Rey cries, heart pounding in her ears. “Bullshit, I don’t care, I can’t just stand by and do nothing!”  
  
He flinches, as if he’s heard something she hasn’t, and then reaches out to take her hands. “I’ll come to you,” he says, hurried. “Name the place, I’ll do everything in my power, but I’m not asking you to put yourself in danger for this, not for me.”  
  
“Tattooine,” she blurts out, gripping the ghosts of his hands tightly in hers. “Can you make it to Tattooine?”  
  
“I can.”  
  
“I’ll find you,” she says. “Just- please.”  
  
He disappears.

\--

Rey flies to Tattooine, because it’s far from the Resistance, and she doesn’t want to lead whoever is following Ben back to her friends, she’d never forgive herself. She tries to find him in the Force, but can only ever see him for a fleeting moment, long enough to know he’s still alive, before he casts her away again.  
  
“Where are you?” he gasps out, hours after she’s landed.  
  
“Mos Eisley,” she says. “I’m in the spaceport.”  
  
“I’ll find you.”  
  
For hours Rey sits on the half-lowered gangway of the one-man freighter she’d liberated- borrowed, with Rose’s help, without clearance- for the trip. She watches the shadows cast by the twin suns grow and shift, until they’ve nearly overtaken the floor of the spaceport.  
  
Then, in the thin sliver of remaining daylight as the binary suns edge towards the horizon, a figure moves in the shadows near the door, and Rey’s hand goes automatically to her staff, sitting on the floor behind her, the other flicking off the safety on her blaster. The figure pauses just inside the door, as if listening, and Rey draws her blaster, slowly.  
  
“Who are you?” she calls out, and then the figure takes a step out of the shadows towards her, solidifying into a humanoid figure, tall and broad-shouldered.  
  
“You don’t recognize me?” he asks, pulling back his hood.  


“Ben,” Rey says, and she can hear the exhilarated relief in her voice as she takes him in with her eyes, and then he’s striding across the floor and she’s dropping her blaster and jumping out of the freighter and running to him, throwing herself into his arms like she’s wanted to for so long. He’s warm and solid and real, chest firm against her cheek, and he smells like metal and dust, and when he hugs her back, she thinks she could cry.

He pulls back, after a moment, and she steps away to look him over, making sure all his limbs are still there. He looks tired, mostly, and more like his father than he ever has, dressed in beat-up spacer’s garb rather than his layers of black robes. “We should go,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at the entrance he’d just come through. “It’s not safe, I’m still being followed, they sent assassins-“

He stops talking as his eyes go wide and he turns, pulling Rey behind him just before she hears a blaster go off, three times in quick succession. One bolt flies past them and hits the far wall, but the other fly true and Ben grunts with the impact. Rey reacts instinctively, ducking out from behind him and calling her blaster to her, but she’s not quick enough, and the shooter is already disappearing around the corner, just a flash of black cloak retreating away from them. She takes a half-step to chase after them, but she wouldn’t even know who she was following, and Ben is unsteady on his feet, then falling to his knees. She wraps a hand around his shoulders and goes down with him, trying to catch his body or at least slow the descent, but he’s so much bigger than her, and all she can do is support him as he crumples to the ground, heavy and lifeless.

Rey cradles his head in her lap, stroking a hand over his hair, rocking back and forth. “No,” she breathes, low and pained, as his face goes utterly, awfully still. “No, please, no. Not like this. Not like this.” She watches, desperate, for any sign of life, and when he draws a slow, shallow, ragged breath, her hand flies to her mouth to muffle her choked-off sob.

She presses her forehead against his for a moment, and then she’s on her feet, resting his head on the ground as gently as she can, scrambling up onto the ship and opening its door the whole way. She uses the Force to pick him up and carry him on board, sweating with the effort of moving him carefully enough not to injure him further. Rey sets him down on the one bunk tucked into the side of the crew area, and he’s too tall for it so his feet hang off the end. She kneels next to the bunk for a moment’s rest, brushes his hair away from his face and kisses him on the forehead, soft, and says, “Just hold on, please.”

\--

Rey cuts across the galaxy, doubling back and looping around and making short, unnecessary hyperspace jumps, just to make sure she’s not being followed by the First Order or its hitman, and she hates the wasted time, hates the thought of Ben suffering all the while, but she can’t put the Resistance in danger.

Finally, she’s approaching the base she left, and she taps into the private commlink she has with Rose.

“I’m back,” she says, “and I need a medpack, and help, he’s hurt, I have to-”

“He?” Rose asks. “Who’s he? Who’s hurt?”

“Ben,” Rey says. “Ben Solo, Leia’s son.” It’s better than  _ Kylo Ren, former Supreme Leader _ , and it’s truer, too, she thinks. Not that questions of identity matter at all if she can’t get him medical treatment fast.

She can tell Rose has a million questions, but she doesn’t say anything as they load him onto a stretcher and run to the medbay. Finn is waiting there, when they arrive, and his face is open, concern giving way to relief as he sees them both, and then he looks down at the stretcher and it all falls away, and suddenly Rey’s never seen him so furious, and his blaster is out and pointed at Ben’s head.

  
  
“Finn, no,” Rey cries, throwing herself in front of Ben, one hand flying out in front of Finn’s blaster, the other resting on Ben’s chest.  
  
“You brought Kylo Ren here?” he snarls. “What were you thinking, Rey?”  
  
“He’s not- it’s not what you think, Finn, he’s not the enemy anymore, please, he’s wounded, he’s dying-”  
  
“And you should have let him die!” Finn shouts. “Do you have any idea what he’s done?”  
  
“I do,” Rey says, and she can feel tears pricking behind her eyes. “I know, and I- Finn, please, you know me, you know I wouldn’t put us in danger. I trust him.”  
  
“He’s from the First Order!”  
  
“So were you,” Rey says, quietly, and Finn’s face contorts in angry disbelief.  
  
“Don’t compare me to-”  
  
“I’m not,” she says, “I’m not, I’m sorry, Finn, I just-”  
  
“He’s not with the First Order now, is he?” Rose asks her.  
  
“No,” Rey says. “No, he left, that’s how he- they were hunting him. He left.”  
  
Rose nods, firm, and looks over at Finn. “He deserves a chance,” Rose says, with conviction. And then, softer, with a significant glance at Rey’s hand where it lays over Ben’s heart, “Remember what I said? About saving the ones we love?”  
  
Finn looks between the two of them, at Ben’s limp, pale body, at Rey’s panicked, pleading eyes, and he grits his teeth and holsters his blaster.  
  
“Kylo Ren was just a myth,” he says. “Everyone knows that.”  
  
Rey could cry with relief. “Finn, thank you,” she says, but he won’t even look at her.  
  
“Don’t.”  
  
And then he turns and walks away, and Rey feels her heart crack.  
  
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Rose warns, and follows after him.

\--

Rey doesn’t leave his bedside, watching numbers flicker across the glass over his face, listening to the soft beep of monitors and med-droids.  
  
Leia shows up about an hour after he’s stabilized, sinking down into the seat next to Rey. She reaches out to touch her son’s hand, and when Rey looks at her face she thinks she’s never seen it so soft or so sad or so full of love.  
  
“I’m glad I was wrong,” says the General, running her thumb over his knuckles. “Thank you, Rey.”  
  
“What’s going to happen to him?” Rey asks, looking back at his face, serene in artificial sleep. She’s exhausted from a day of travel and worry, and she’s starting to come down off her adrenaline high, but she wants to be there when he wakes up, so she’s not going anywhere.  
  
Leia sighs. “Not many people know… who he is, so we could try lying, hiding it. But, well, look how that worked out with Vader. And I imagine people will want him to pay for his crimes. But he left the First Order of his own volition, didn’t he?” Rey nods. “Hm. And he’s one of the last experienced Force users in the galaxy. That, combined with whatever intelligence he can provide, would be an incredible boon to the Resistance, so it would be foolish to execute him, but we would need him to be held accountable.” She sits back and considers the man laid out before her, and then turns her eyes on Rey, tilting her head in that regal, considering way Leia has about her. “I think perhaps we place him under the supervision of someone powerful enough to keep him in line. A Force-user like him- a Jedi, perhaps?”  
  
Rey gapes at her, and there’s the slightest twinkle of amusement in her eyes. “I won’t- but- no one will accept that, General. Not considering I’m… how I feel about him.”  
  
“How do you feel about him?” Leia asks. “I don’t recall you ever saying anything to anyone other than that he was a monster who killed Han Solo. I can’t imagine that’s changed, since you haven’t seen him since then, except for when you killed his master.”  
  
“I didn’t kill Snoke,” says Rey, frowning, as she catches onto what Leia’s saying. “Ben did.”  
  
Leia’s eyebrow quirks. “That’ll certainly help his case. I don’t know anyone who’ll object to him being watched over by the last Jedi. You’re certainly doing a good job guarding him now.” Leia’s lips quirk with amusement, and Rey ducks her head to hide her blush. “If we have nothing to fear from him, then he’ll prove it, and he can serve the Resistance and put the past behind him. He wouldn’t be the first.”  
  
“Thank you,” Rey says, soft.  
  
“Don’t thank me,” Leia tells her, rising to her feet. “I love him too, you know.” Leia brushes a hand over her hair, soft, maternal, and Rey looks up in shock. “Take care of him, all right?”  
  
“I will,” Rey promises.

\--

Rey isn’t sure when she falls asleep, but the next thing she knows, she’s opening her eyes, bleary, to the sensation of someone’s hand on her face. It takes a moment for her mind to catch up, and then she’s bolt upright, catching Ben’s hand in hers.  
  
“You’re awake! How do you feel? Are you all right?” She searches his face for any sign of pain, but he just smiles tiredly at her.  
  
“You feel different in real life,” he says, reaching up again to touch her face. “I prefer it.”  
  
“Me too,” she says, heart full, leaning into his hand on her cheek.  
  
“You should rest, sweetheart. In a bed.”  
  
“I don’t want to leave-”  
  
“I’ll be fine. My mother was here, I spoke to her while you were asleep. I’m technically under arrest, but it’s not as if I can go anywhere. Go sleep, I’ll still be here.”  
  
Rey wants to protest more, but when she opens her mouth she’s interrupted by a wide, jaw-cracking yawn, and he’s got that look on his face, the corners of his mouth pressed tight in a suppressed grin of amusement, so she rolls her eyes and gets to her feet, stretching out and appreciating the crack of her spine settling back into place. On a half-baked impulse, she leans down and kisses his cheek, then walks out before he can react or she can second-guess herself.  
  
Her sleep is restless and fitful, shot through with dreams of being left behind, and every time she wakes up she considers reaching out in the Force, just to talk to him, but remembers that he’s on base now, that she can just go see him, and falls back asleep smiling. Finally, the alarm she set goes off as she’s staring at the ceiling trying to will herself back to sleep after a particularly nasty memory, and she sighs in relief at the beeping that tells her she can stop chasing sleep now. She hurries through the fresher and rushes to the canteen to grab something quick to eat, some local fruit that’s bright blue and more flesh than juice, a little bigger than her fist with a thick rind, sour at first with a lingering sweet aftertaste.  
  
She’s peeled it about halfway when she gets to the medbay and sees Rose standing in the door, and then Finn standing over Ben’s bed, and she almost drops the fruit in a surge of panic.  
  
Rose is already at her side, though, hand on her shoulder. “Hey, it’s fine, he just wants to talk to him, I promise.”  
  
And all they’re doing is talking, as far as Rey can tell- Finn is standing, arms crossed, anger in every line of his body, and Ben looks equally tense in the hard set of his shoulders, but he’s looking down at his hands in his lap, and he looks so utterly sad that Rey wants to rush in anyway, just to wrap her arms around him and wipe the tragedy off his face. “Finn’s still angry,” she says.  
  
“I talked to him yesterday, after we walked out,” Rose says. “I don’t understand most of it, and I… can’t say I don’t understand why he’s angry with you. I’m angry with you too, actually.”  
  
Rey knows she looks stricken when she turns to her friend. “Rose-”  
  
“No, it’s… nothing is ever simple, Rey, I get that. I know you love us, but I know you love him too, and don’t deny it, it’s so obvious, you’re like a holodrama heroine when you look at him. But I haven’t heard his side of the story yet, only Finn’s, and I thought about it and if all I knew about Finn was that he’d been a stormtrooper, I wouldn’t trust him either, but there’s more to him than that, and I trust that there’s more to Ben than… his other name, or you wouldn’t look like that, and you wouldn’t have brought him here.”  
  
Rey pulls Rose into her arms. “Thank you,” she says, holding her tightly.  
  
“If we didn’t give people a second chance, we’d be no better than the bad guys,” Rose says, all kindness, and Rey loves that about her, her idealism, the way she seems to see the best of every situation. The whole world is a story to Rose, and it’s one with a happy ending, where the good guys win and love and hope prevail, and everyone holds onto each other as the music swells.  
  
Rey lets go of her and looks back into the medbay. Finn seems more relaxed, and Ben’s shoulders are slumped, but as she watches, Finn holds out a hand, and Ben stares at it in confused surprise for a moment, before reaching out, slowly, and shaking it. Finn nods once, and then turns and walks out, towards where Rey and Rose are standing.  
  
He stops in front of Rey. “Is it true?” he asks. “That he’s the one who killed the Supreme Leader?”  
  
“Yes,” Rey says. “Snoke wanted him to kill me, but Ben lied. He killed him instead, and saved me, and then he fought next to me.”  
  
Finn nods, thoughtful. “I don’t trust him,” he says, “but I believe you do, and I trust you, so that’s enough for now.” He hugs Rey, quickly, and things might not be completely okay between them now, but Rey believes they will be again.  
  
Ben is still staring at his hands, brow furrowed, when Rey comes in and sits down. “Hi,” she says, warmly, holding out a portion of the blue fruit. “Want some?”  
  
He wrinkles his nose. “No thanks.”  
  
She shrugs and pops it into her mouth. “Suit yourself. What did Finn want?”  
  
“To make sure I wasn’t a threat, mostly. I assured him I’m not a spy.” He tilts his head curiously at her, the corners of his mouth rising in one of his tiny, subtle smiles. “He seems to think I’m in a position to break your heart, as well.”  
  
Rey ducks her head and takes another bite of fruit to avoid answering.  
  
“I thought that was interesting,” Ben continues. “I know what my feelings are, but that’s the first I’ve heard on the subject of your own.”  
  
Rey looks up at him through her lashes, and is gratified to see his cool, even tone betrayed by a clear, quiet anxiety in his eyes. “And what are your feelings?” she asks, slowly.  
  
“That I love you,” he says, easy. “That you’re the most important thing in the world, to me. That I don’t care who turns to whose side, as long as the part of the vision where you and I are together is true, in some way, however you want it to be.”  
  
Rey sets aside the remainder of her fruit, carefully, and reaches out to weave her fingers through his. “How do you want it to be?”  
  
“I... don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” he says, hesitant.  
  
Rey figures she owes him something in return for his confession, so she leans forward, a hand on his cheek turning his face towards her, and kisses him, the barest, chaste press of lips, and his mouth is just as soft as she thought it would be, and when she pulls back after a moment he breathes out a slight, shaking gust of air, and reaches up to tangle his fingers in her hair, keeping her from moving any further away.  
  
“I want it to be like that,” he murmurs, and leans forward to kiss her again, deeper, filled with intent. He traces his tongue over the seam of her lips, and she opens her mouth with a sigh, pressing closer, her hand coming up against his chest, right over where she can feel his heart pounding as they kiss, and kiss, and kiss.  
  
“Like that,” he says, when they finally break away, and his eyes are wide and dark, his lips kiss-swollen and redder than they have any right to be, and Rey smiles, wide and bright and half-ridiculous, her chest feeling like a barely-contained sunburst of warmth and delight.  
  
“Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://www.thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


End file.
